Separate Ways
The difference between today's autonomists and yesterday's secessionists is that the former are happy to pretend at sovereignty
Mark Steyn - April 23, 2007
In the early hours after the Quebec election, the pundits wondered whether Andr? Boisclair was, ahem, "too Montreal" for Quebec's "rural bigots." This was a tentative albeit euphemistic toe in the murky water of whether M. Boisclair was, according to taste, too gay, too coked, too hedonist. Hard to believe the analysts could regard these characteristics as liabilities. That's certainly not the impression one would have got from the P?quiste leader's clippings a year and a half ago, when the papers were full of cooing profiles about how the "Generation X" "party boy" with the "matin?e idol looks" represented "the new face of Quebec politics" (Toronto Star ) and proved that Quebecers are "ready to embrace an openly gay premier" (The Gazette).
In January last year, after Stephen Harper's election victory a few weeks later, I mentioned in Britain's Daily Telegraph the unforeseen upsurge in the Tory vote from la belle province, and I wondered whether it had anything to do with M. Boisclair winning the PQ leadership back in the fall:
"A couple of months later and a hitherto all but invisible Quebec 'conservative' vote re-emerges after a decades-long hibernation and abandons the separatist cause.
"Coincidence? Depends what you're snorting. But my sense is that, outside the metropolitan fleshpots, most people are more socially conservative than they're willing to tell pollsters--and that 'tolerance' is not the same as 'approval,' and a popular gay soap character or queenly old rocker is not the same as a gay party leader or transsexual prime minister."
Well, I don't claim to be a genius, but that throwaway from January 2006 seems to me sounder than 90 per cent of the electoral post mortems. Anyone who's spent ten minutes in the Beauce or Shawinigan with his eyes open would be foolish to bet the store on the lazy assumption that simply because Quebecers are wedded to economically moribund welfare statism that presupposes an equal enthusiasm for socially progressive gay hedonism. A friend of mine's parents, up at Lac
St-Jean, are the hardest of the hard-core purs et durs: they've voted the separatist ticket every election since the Quiet Revolution. But not this time.
"Homophobic bigots"? Well, maybe. But as I wrote in this space in November 2005:
"Andr? Boisclair is a good enough head for a 'fantasy playground,' but the 'Father of his Country'?
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